Is it possible to automatically subscribe to all (federated) communities with the same name?

Example in the screenshot: I want to follow !astronomy, and I don’t really care whether the content is coming from from Lemmy.World, kbin.social and mander.xyz - I just want to see it all.

Obviously I could manually subscribe to them all, but is it possible to do so automatically? Ideally if a new similar community pops up on another instance, I wouldn’t miss it.

I read here that community grouping is a thing, so that instances with identical communities can work together. Is that a feature that could work towards this end?

  • Cr4yfish
    1•1 year ago

    Figuring out if two posts are identical is going to be a challenge

    I think I could deal with duplicates pretty easily by checking if different properties of the post are identical, the more are the less likely it is that the post will be shown.

    I think a bigger problem is the comments. What if a user reposts a post from r/astronomy on lemmy.world to c/astronomy on lemmy.ml? Which one do we show, and what do we do with the comments of the other? Merge them together, or just leave them? Maybe show a button on the post when there’s a duplicate und the user can switch instances?

    Lots of figuring out to do, but it sounds fun!

    Edit: The Group-by-Hashtag thing is also a good idea! That would of course make the whole thing less of a headache, but to make that work a lot of users need to do that.